


The Things People Carry

by nagi_schwarz



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Crossover, Gen, intoabar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6521293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evan Lorne is home on his first annual leave from Atlantis and goes to the Paint Nite at the bar down the street from his old college dorms. The night's theme is a portrait exchange. His portrait partner is an unusual woman named Luna Lovegood Scamander. Set in Season 3 of Stargate Atlantis, post-series for Harry Potter, epilogue-compliant. Featuring cameos by Julian (Forbidden Games), Deborah (Secret Circle), Kaitlyn and Gabriel (Dark Visions), and Peter Grodin (Stargate Atlantis).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Things People Carry

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2016 [](http://intoabar.livejournal.com/profile)[intoabar](http://intoabar.livejournal.com/) ficathon. Especial thanks to [](http://brumeier.livejournal.com/profile)[brumeier](http://brumeier.livejournal.com/) for being an excellent and speedy beta reader. Everything I know about painting portraits I learned on WikiHow.

When Evan told the other guys he was going to a bar, he hadn’t been lying. He _was_ going to a bar. But not to get drunk and impress girls with his tales as an Air Force Major and hopefully get laid. It was the monthly Paint Nite at the wine bar down the street from the dorms he’d lived in during college. While Evan had been raised by a grandmother and mother who were both staunch feminists and had done much to dispel the notion that hobbies were “masculine” or “feminine”, he’d spent most of his adult life in the Air Force around men who held to very traditional notions of gender roles, so the fact that he painted just...never came up in conversation. Now, Atlantis was full of odd-balls and strange geniuses, so no one minded that he painted. But the men he’d served with before the SGC, when he hadn’t had time to paint, were less understanding about that sort of thing, especially when he could have been going out and getting laid. He was on Earth for his first annual leave from Atlantis, and he wanted to spend time with family, but he understood the social obligation to at least see some of his other buddies while he was in town.

He also desperately needed time alone. Away from his mother and sister and their well-meaning but dangerously prying questions. Away from being a soldier with his old Air Force buddies. He needed to be just Evan.

So he packed up his favorite paintbrushes, palette, and palette knife, told his mother he was going out with the boys, told the boys he was going out to a bar, and to Paint Nite he went.

Julian was behind the bar, serving drinks with inhuman precision but not really listening to anything anyone said, because he wasn’t much of a listener or a talker. He was just there to be beautiful and serve drinks. (And he was beautiful, with his frost-white hair and glacier-blue eyes and sooty black lashes and -)

Kaitlyn was taking cover fees at the door - a little extra for canvas and paint - and her face lit up when she recognized Evan. “Hey, you! Long time no see! How long has it been?”

“About a year,” Evan admitted. He let her pull him in for a hug (fully aware that her very scary boyfriend Gabriel was probably watching and glowering the entire time). “My post is pretty remote, so we only get leave once a year.”

Kaitlyn frowned. “How far can you possibly be? Outer space?”

Evan laughed. “Something like that. What’s the theme tonight?”

“Portraits.” Kaitlyn handed him a slip of paper. “Put your name in the hat. Someone will draw it, and then you and your partner will face off and paint each other’s portraits.”

“Sounds like a challenge.” Evan scrawled his name on the slip and put it into the fedora she held out, and then he accepted his canvas and acrylic paints and went to get a drink from Julian.

The doors closed after half an hour. Evan was a quarter of the way through his glass of wine, limbs loosening, whole body relaxing, when Kaitlyn declared that it was time for the painting to begin. Evan was pleased to see how many people had showed up. Some he recognized as regulars, like the old couple who always came in together (he a chemist by day and a colorblind artist by night, she a writer by day and a dancer by night, she the worse artist of the two but the more enthusiastic). Others he could see were first-timers with brand new, cheap paintbrushes and a little too much wine in them. Mostly he was scanning their faces, looking for interesting over beautiful. California was a magnet for beautiful people, most of them hoping for Hollywood.

Kaitlyn climbed up onto the stage where open mic performers usually were and brandished the fedora. Gabriel and Deborah (dark curly hair, fierce scowl, built like Xena, with a fine eye for color) were scrambling to set up the easels and stools.

“All right, who wants to paint?”

Cheers rose up.

Kaitlyn beamed. “Tonight’s theme is portraits. Everyone has put their name in this hat. One person will draw a name. That’s your partner. If you have picked, we’ll just disregard your name if someone else draws it. Are you ready?”

More cheers filled the bar.

Kaitlyn held out the fedora. “Line up!” Everyone shuffled into some semblance of a line, winding around the perimeter of the room. Evan watched to see who was picking whom.

Somehow, the husband and wife managed to pick each other.

One of the other regulars cooed. “It’s true love.”

The woman leaned up on her toes and kissed her husband, and together they went to claim a pair of easels facing each other.

Evan was disappointed that someone picked the man with the scar on his lip and the red-headed girl with the brown eyes.

He was eyeing a dark-skinned woman speculatively, wondering at her ethnicity, when someone called his name.

“Evan Lorne?” The woman standing at the front of the line had straggly, waist-length blonde hair and was wearing a necklace that looked like it was made of wine corks and beer bottle caps and a dress that had been made out of patches from a dozen different afghans, brightly-colored granny squares haphazardly sewn together but somehow forming an attractive silhouette on the woman.

Evan raised his hand and stepped out of line, moved toward her. Up close, he could see she was wearing a pair of glasses that had colored lenses in them. Something about them reminded Evan of the stained glass windows in Atlantis. She also had a wooden conductor’s baton tucked behind her ear the way some artists kept pencils.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was soft and wispy, and she had a foreign accent. “I’m Luna Lovegood Scamander.”

British, Evan thought, or maybe Irish. “Pleased to meet you, Luna.” Her name was unusual. Her handshake was faint and absent, but she sat solidly on the stool in front of her easel.

She was carrying a tiny purse in addition to her canvas, which she settled on the easel carefully. Besides the conductor’s baton behind her ear, when she turned her head Evan saw that she had an array of paintbrushes tucked into the bun in her hair. “Is it Evan or Evander?”

“Just Evan,” he said, angling his easel so he could see her while he painted. “I’ve never heard of Evander as a name before.”

“Evan is one of the Welsh variants of John,” Luna said. “Evander, on the other hand, means _bow warrior_ or _archer_. Names are very important. Names are magic.” She said this last as if she were imparting a great secret. “I’m just Luna.”

“Luna is a lovely name.” She’d have fit right in with all the other kids on the commune growing up. Evan and Natalia had always felt a little like black sheep, with their ‘mundane’ names. “Are you a professional artist?” Evan balanced his glass of wine in the cup holder specially attached to the easel and studied her. He fished a pencil out of his pocket to do a preliminary sketch, get the proportions of her face before he committed any colors to canvas.

“No, I’m something of a zoologist,” she said. “I believe your sort of people would call me a...cryptozoologist.”

“My sort of people?” Evan asked, amused. She had a broad forehead and wide-set eyes. Her nose was neat and straight, and her lips were a lovely shade of rose, if a little thin. Her eyebrows were fine and arched, and she was pretty, in an unconventional way.

“...Civilians,” Luna said, enunciating the word like she was testing it out.

“I’m not exactly a civilian,” Evan said.

Luna actually reached up and lifted her sunglasses so she could peer at him. “Really?” Her eyes reminded him of Kaitlyn’s, electric blue with dark blue rings around the outsides of her irises - witch-rings, or so Kaitlyn had said.

“I’m in the military - the Air Force, to be specific,” Evan said. “Home on leave for a couple of weeks. My mom’s an art teacher, so I really enjoy painting.”

“Oh. That kind of non-civilian.” She actually sounded a little disappointed. She lowered her sunglasses once more and peered at him through them. He wondered if they were prescription. “Although…”

“Although what?” Evan asked.

“Although there is something in your aura.” Luna hummed thoughtfully.

Kaitlyn, Gabriel, and Deborah were moving among the easels, distributing tubes of acrylic paint, primary colors plus white.

“My aura?” Evan echoed.

“Yes. Something I hadn’t expected to see from a civilian at all.”

“Such as?” Evan asked.

“I shall paint it so you can see.” Luna smiled at him. Her smile was slow and dreamy.

“Right.” Evan accepted tubes of paint from Gabriel (who glared at him for daring to hug Kaitlyn earlier). “So...Luna, do you want me to paint you with your sunglasses on or off?”

“Oh, these aren’t sunglasses,” she said. “They’re aurascopes. They allow me to see people’s auras. The things people carry around with them are often fascinating, but usually alarming.”

Evan wondered if she was drunk or crazy or both. With her accent - definitely Irish - it was hard to tell which. Her glass of wine was mostly full, though. “I’ve never heard of them before. Where did you find them?”

“At a...market in London,” she said, and Evan recognized the pause, the self-editing. He’d had to learn to make his elisions more subtle when he was talking around classified information. “Rumor has it they belonged to Merlin himself.”

Evan wondered what people would do if they’d known Merlin was not, in fact, a great wizard, but an Ancient whose Ancient powers greatly resembled magic. “So you believe in magic?”

“Don’t you?” Luna tilted her head at him curiously.

The straggliness of her hair would be the hardest part to paint. The most fun part would be the colored lenses of her ‘aurascopes’ and her granny square dress. “Not so much.” Evan shrugged ruefully.

“Really?” Luna peered at him again. “How unexpected, given what you carry with you.”

Evan wondered just what it was she thought she was seeing in his aura.

The preliminary sketch was done. Evan tucked his pencil absently behind his ear and set about squeezing some primary colors onto his palette. Since they only had about three hours to do this - chances were they’d exchange paintings at the end, or at least want to pose with the finished product - he wasn’t going to be too picky about getting exact hues. He was just about happy with the yellow when Luna leapt off her stool and crowded into his personal space, caught his chin in her hand and tilted his head up.

“What color are your eyes?”

“Blue.”

“What kind of blue?”

“No one’s ever asked beyond ‘blue’. I don’t have a mirror,” Evan said apologetically. Her grip wasn’t very tight, and she didn’t smell like she was drunk. She was just...eccentric. He’d grown up around a lot of eccentric people. No harm, no foul.

Luna made another thoughtful noise, then stepped back, resumed her seat in front of her easel.

Evan took a fortifying sip of his wine and started on the yellow and violet.

The thing about painting was that it was like any other skill: technical, and required practice. Evan had inherited some natural artistic talent from his mother, but he’d become the artist he was through rigorous practice and study of appropriate artistic methods. Painting a portrait was easy and done well if done in the right steps. For him, the process was fairly formulaic. He knew some of the best or most famous artists had developed methods on their own, using their natural intuition with color, but his mother’s methods had always worked for him, and as a soldier, he was practical. He did what worked.

First, yellow for outlines, then violet for the initial shading. He mixed the yellow so it was pale, and mixed the violet so it matched one of the hues in her granny square dress.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“England,” Luna said. “A small town called Ottery St. Catchpole. You probably won’t find it on any maps.”

Evan had never been to England. He’d been to other planets, but not to very many countries on his own planet.

“What about you?” Luna asked, and then, “Turn so I can see your ear. Where are you from?”

“I was born and raised around here, grew up on a kind of farming community just outside the city,” Evan said.

“Really? Hm. I’d have thought you were from somewhere else.” Luna eyed him critically, then nodded when she no longer needed to study his ear.

“Like where?”

“I don’t know what it’s called,” she said, “but it’s very...blue. Like your eyes, really. You have lovely eyes.”

“As do you,” Evan said. “You know, the rings around the outside of your irises? In some places they call them witch-rings.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense, seeing how I’m a witch and all,” Luna said. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Oh. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. Maybe I’ve had too much wine.”

Evan had never gotten so drunk he’d accidentally let classified information spill. “I promise to keep your secret,” he said, and she smiled.

“I’m sure you’re very good at keeping secrets.”

The next stage was shades of red - to color the blush of her cheeks and the fullness of her lips, places where blood was flowing. When Evan described the steps for doing an acrylic portrait, people looked disappointed at how formulaic it was. For Evan, it was smart, simple. He only had to mix colors once. He used his palette knife to clean off his palette, paused to clean his brushes and take another sip of wine.

Kaitlyn wandered through the easels, offering constructive criticism and encouragement. She squeezed Evan’s shoulder. “I really like the hue you picked for her lips. That’s great.”

She peeked at Luna’s canvas and smiled. “You really nailed the color of his eyes. Perfect.”

“Thank you,” Luna said sincerely.

Evan studied the line of her throat. He’d need some pale pink at her pulse points. “So...Lovegood Scamander. Not names I’ve heard before.”

“Lovegood is my name, Scamander my husband’s,” she said. “I use both names because I began my career before we were married, but his name carries some weight and reputation in our profession, and also it matches our children’s names.”

Evan raised his eyebrows. “You have children?”

“Twins,” she said. “Lorcan and Lysander. If we have another boy, Lorne is a very lovely name. Means ‘forsaken’.”

Evan had never paid that much attention to what people’s names meant and certainly hadn’t known that about his own name. Earlier, Luna had mentioned names were magic. Maybe that was why she knew so much about names, if she was a witch.

“Do you have any children of your own?” she asked.

Evan huffed. “Unless you count a hundred unruly marines, not really.”

Luna looked at him blankly. She had no clue what he was talking about.

He cleared his throat. “Ah, no. No children of my own. My sister has two kids, though, so I have a niece and nephew. Michael and Gabriella. Mikey and Gabby, really.”

“Children are wonderful.” Luna smiled to herself, and the expression was surprisingly present, lucid, compared to her general dreamy air.

Evan flicked his paint brush, captured the line of it. It was perfect for her portrait.

The next stage was green, filling in the next round of shadows for the under-painting. Humans naturally had green tones in their skin, hard to notice, but definitely present, and using green to fill in some of the shadows of her skin would give it a living tone.

“So, did you and your husband meet at work? You mentioned he’s prominent in your career field.” Evan could only wonder what kind of man could keep up with Luna. Though her motions were languid and deliberate, she was by no means slow, and she was obviously brilliant, if her steel trap of a memory was any indication.

“Yes,” she said, and a flush rose on her cheeks. She raised her aurascopes, rested them on her head like a pair of sunglasses, and her eyes were bright. “We were in the Black Forest - not to be confused with the Dark Forest - on independent searches for the Erlking.”

“Erlking?” Evan prodded. He knew about the Black Forest. That was real enough. Also, he liked black forest ice cream.

He drank some wine and reflected maybe he should have eaten more before he left the house.

“Yes,” Luna said. “King of the elves - not house elves, who are benign and generally friendly. The Fair Folk. Tall and terrible and beautiful. Steal children.”

“That is terrible,” Evan agreed. “Did you find him?”

“No. He’s very shy. But I found Rolf.” Luna giggled to herself. “He was up a tree, thinking he could lure the Erlking out with a chocolate cake. Silly man.”

“Silly indeed.” Evan paused to lighten the green some for the shadows around her jaw.

Luna tossed her head. “Everyone knows the Erlking likes wine, rum, or beer. Maybe mead, if it’s made with the right honey.”

“Absolutely.” Evan was convinced Luna was pretty crazy, but she was fun to talk to, at any rate. Evan suspected he’d sound just as crazy if he talked about Atlantis and the Stargate program. “Is your work dangerous?”

“It can be,” Luna said, and then asked him to turn to her so she could study his mouth. “But generally these creatures are misunderstood. If we could understand them better, we’d be able to get along more, share the spaces we live in.”

Evan strongly suspected that the creatures she was referring to were actually (in her fictional world, at any rate) very dangerous, but she wasn’t wrong. If they understood each other better, they’d get along more. Best as Evan understood the Wraith, the Wraith wanted to eat humans. Evan had it on good authority that the humans didn’t want to be eaten. He wasn’t sure how they would share the space they lived in.

Evan sipped some more wine - someone had topped up his glass while he was painting - and cleaned his brushes, switched to blue. Blue shading would unify the green and purple he’d laid down earlier, blend them so the skin color looked more natural in the over-painting. “What brings you to America?” he asked.

“Research,” she said. “I’m trying to find - well, I don’t know that you have a name for it here.”

“Describe it,” Evan suggested. Even though she was moving, he could paint a still image of her just fine. In fact, seeing her animated would help him capture her motion in the lines of her face, the curve of her mouth.

“It’s a cross between a wrackspurt and a niffler,” she said. He was pretty sure she was making the thing up, but he nodded and made an interested noise, the way he’d learned to do when his niece was recounting her favorite episode of My Little Pony.

Luna was an imaginative woman, to say the least. She described the creature in detail, its typical habitat, its diet, even its mating patterns. Evan was impressed, especially if she was making it all up on the spot. What he enjoyed most of all was how animated she was while she spoke of the mythical creature.

She pulled her aurascopes back down and studied Evan through them. He couldn’t help but wonder if her painting of him would come out looking like she’d painted him through a stained-glass window. Since her eyes were so pretty, he decided to paint her with the aurascopes perched atop her hair, like an Ancient tiara.

“So, what does a man do in this...Air Force?” Luna asked.

“About the same as a man does in the Royal Air Force, I guess.”

“Royal Air Force?” Luna echoed.

“The British equivalent of the United States Air Force,” Evan said slowly.

Luna raised her eyebrows. “How do you force air? With bellows or some kind of machine?”

“I’m a pilot,” Evan said. “I fly cargo planes.” That was what he’d originally been trained on. That he’d got his stripes for the F-302 was classified. As it turned out, not being a zoomie had helped, because F-302s had inertial dampeners and handled very differently from Earth fighters.

“I’m not much fond of flying,” Luna said, “but I’m sure for you it’s very peaceful.”

“Yeah,” Evan said flatly. “Peaceful.” He cleared his throat. “How’s your painting coming?”

“Lovely,” she said. “You’re very lovely. And your aura is just...fascinating.”

“Thank you.” Evan was blushing for absolutely no good reason. Maybe the wine.

The next stage of the painting was orange, which was typically a color he used sparingly, lest the subject end up looking burnt-out. Because there was orange in her dress and the lenses of her aurascopes, he’d need to use a bit more, but he didn’t need to mix a lot. He’d built her glasses and dress with each layer of color, and somehow the effect was that she looked like she was wearing stained glass, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Luna was a fascinating combination of pastels - hair, lips, skin - and jewel tones (glasses, eyes, dress).

“So...how are you liking America?” Evan asked.

“It’s been wonderful so far. So big. So much biodiversity, too. River nymphs are much more distinct from lake nymphs, and the canyon river nymphs I’ve never seen anywhere else.” Luna pause and raised her aurascopes once more, frowned at her painting. She sipped some wine. Evan suspected someone was refilling hers much more frequently than they were refilling his. “Also some unique avian species. The people are quite nice, too. You’ve been very nice, listening to me ramble all evening.”

“You have a pleasant voice,” Evan said, which was true. It had taken him a while to get used to the cadences of her speech, but there was something soothing about the way she spoke.

“Have you ever been to England?” she asked.

“Never had the pleasure.”

“If you do ever come, post me a letter before you do. You’d be welcome to stay with us.”

Evan blinked. “That’s a very generous offer, Luna, but shouldn’t you check with your husband?”

“Rolf would be thrilled to have you visit. All the things you know and have seen.” Luna gazed at him steadily, and he had to resist the urge to squirm. She lowered her aurascopes and began painting furiously.

“Well, then thank you,” Evan said. He wasn’t sure if he should make a reciprocal offer, but then Luna was asking him to tilt his head a certain way so she could get a good look at him, and Evan was just grateful that the moment had passed without awkwardness.

The last stage of the portrait was adding the white highlights. Given the paleness of Luna’s hair and skin, the brightness of her eyes and the way the light was playing off her aurascopes, Evan needed a lot of white. He took extra care to clean off his brushes and palette and knife before squirting a dollop of white onto the palette, and then he forced himself to pause, take a deep breath.

The final stage.

“How’s it going, everyone?” Kaitlyn asked. “I’ve been walking around and seeing what people are doing, and there’s some pretty impressive art happening in here. Do we need some more wine to go with it?”

Cheers rose up, but Evan was focused on feathering the white into Luna’s hair to make it look as airy and light as it was in real life. When he finally finished, he drained the last of the wine out of his glass in a single swallow, and he hoisted his empty glass high.

Painting finished.

Kaitlyn hopped off the stage and came to inspect his work.

“Oh, Evan,” she said, “it’s beautiful. You must have been practicing, wherever it is The Man has you stationed.” She pressed a kiss to his cheek.

He was just tipsy enough that he let her. “Thanks, Kaitlyn. Thank my mom, though. She taught me.”

“Mama Lorne must be so proud of you,” Kaitlyn said. She circled around to Luna. “Are you ready for the big reveal?” 

“Almost,” Luna said. “Just one more dash of blue - there!” She finished her glass of wine and raised it high.

“All right.” Kaitlyn clapped her hands and ushered Luna and Evan both onto their feet. “Take a look at what your partner has done.”

Luna stepped around to Evan’s easel, and she pushed her aurascopes high on her head, gazed at the painting with wide eyes.

“I’m not that beautiful, am I?”

“Of course you are,” Kaitlyn said immediately. “Evan’s a very talented artist. He’s great a capturing a person beyond the lines of their face.”

Luna beamed at Evan, full watt, and it was like watching the noonday sun emerge from behind a cloud. “Thank you.” She leaned up on her toes and kissed him. “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome,” he said gently. “Do you want to keep it, or…?”

“See mine first.” Luna caught his wrist and tugged him around to her easel.

He took a deep breath, prepared for anything (one woman always painted cubist style, being a fan of certain eras of Picasso), and stared.

He hadn’t been prepared for...that.

His portrait looked good. Luna was a talented painter. She’d captured the awkward line of his nose, his dimple, and the color of his eyes.

And she painted the Atlantis gate room as his background.

Evan swallowed hard. “Luna,” he said, “you’re a very talented painter. I especially like the background you composed. Mine’s pretty lame in comparison.” It was just a wash of pale violet to offset the pale blonde of her hair. “How did you come up with it?”

She tapped her aurascopes. “It’s what you carry with you in your aura, obviously. You carry a lot with you, but this is the most fascinating. It’s one of Merlin’s rings, you know. Very few of _my_ people know about them. I was surprised _you_ do.”

“What does Merlin’s ring do?” Evan asked.

“No one has been able to make one work in a long time.” Luna shrugged.

Merlin was an Ancient. The Ancients had built the Stargates.

“I’ve heard talk that with the right kind of power, one can make stone rings function the same way, but I’ve yet to see it happen.”

Evan said, “Can I see your aurascopes?”

Luna nodded and tugged them off her head, held them out to him. “I don’t know that a...civilian like you would be able to get much use of out them, but feel free. Only be careful, because they once belonged to Merin.”

As soon as the aurascopes were in his hand, Evan felt it, the familiar thrum of Ancient tech being initiated by someone with the ATA gene. He slid the glasses on - and was it just his imagination, or did they adjust themselves to fit his face with the subtlest slide and expansion? - and looked at Luna.

It was like looking at her through a stained-glass window and through a quantum mirror. Because Luna wasn’t just Luna, she was the ghost of her dead mother (who looked so much like her) and a man in a black robe with a noseless, serpentine face, and a boy with Sheppard-messy hair and a lightning-shaped scar and a hat shaped like an eagle that flapped its wings.

Evan tugged the glasses off, eyes wide.

Luna prowled closer to him, eyes narrowed, gaze bright and fierce and lucid. “What did you see?”

Evan described the hat, because it was burned most vividly in his memory. “What does it mean?”

Luna’s glasses were Ancient tech. She was wandering around with Ancient tech. She said she’d picked them up in a market in London, believed they had once belonged to Merlin. How had they ended up in a market in London?

“The eagle was the mascot for my house in boarding school,” she said.

“Boarding school?” Evan echoed.

“Hogwarts,” she said, studying him intently. He’d never heard of it.

She tilted her head quizzically, like a bird. “How is it that you can see through these glasses but have never heard of Hogwarts?”

Evan couldn’t tell her that he had an alien gene in him. “I have no idea.” She must have had the ATA gene too. “What else did you see in my aura?”

Before Luna could answer, other wine glasses were being hoisted high, and Kaitlyn was running around to exclaim over the finished pieces. Deborah rearranged the easels carefully and herded Evan and Luna into posing first beside their own paintings, then beside their own portraits. Evan’s mind was spinning. On the one hand, if images of a Stargate - let alone the Atlantis gate - ended up on the Internet as part of the Paint Nite album for this event, the SGC and IOA would go into a collective panic. On the other hand, Evan hadn’t told Luna a thing about the Stargate. Judging by the way she was looking at him, he wasn’t supposed to be able to use her aurascopes, and she was wondering what to do with that information.

After a brief discussion, they agreed to swap their paintings and also their contact information, and Evan bade Kaitlyn, Gabriel, Deborah, and Julian farewell. Luna caught him at the door.

“Evan,” she said, “would you do me a favor?” She led him out of the bar and toward a side street.

Evan tensed immediately, wary of an ambush, but Luna just set her painting down carefully, resting it against the wall, and plucked her little conductor’s baton from behind her ear. She held it out, so Evan set his painting down as well before he accepted it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Wave it like so -” she demonstrated a graceful flick of her wrist - “and say _lumos_.”

It sounded Latinate, which Ancient was, but Evan was no linguist, so he couldn’t be sure. He obeyed, tense, ready for some kind of terrible reaction, but nothing happened.

Luna looked perplexed. “You can use the aurascopes, but you can’t work a simple _lumos?_ ”

Was that what the device was called? “What is it supposed to do?” Evan asked.

“Light up,” Luna said.

Evan had a lot of practice as an ATA lightswitch, so he thought, _light up_ , and sure enough, a glow appeared at the end of the baton.

Luna’s eyes went very round. “How did you do that?”

Before Evan could answer, there was a sound like a car backfiring, and he spun, bringing one hand up to guard or strike, and there was -

“Grodin?”

Peter Grodin blinked at him. He was wearing a medieval-looking robe and carrying a wooden conductor’s baton like Luna’s.

“Major Lorne,” Grodin said. He immediately hid the baton behind his back. Then he noticed Luna. “Lovegood. Scamander. Luna. Whatever. I received notice that you’d illegally performed m - you know what - in the presence of a m - you know who. Not _that_ You Know Who, obviously. Although...what’s he doing holding your wand?”

“He cast a wordless _lumos_ ,” Luna said. “He’s never heard of Hogwarts, and I’m pretty sure he’s a muggle, except he can use my aurascopes, and he has one of Merlin’s rings in his aura.”

Evan had no idea what a muggle was, but he suspected it was some kind of slang for ‘civilian’.

“She means a stargate,” he said, fixing Grodin with a pointed look. “Would someone tell me what’s going on? And why this nice lady has Ancient tech that she apparently bought at a market in London?”

“Diagon Alley,” Luna said, and at Grodin’s skeptical look, “or rather, Knockturn Alley. At the antique shop where Borgin & Burkes used to be.”

“Ancient tech?” Grodin echoed.

Evan waggled Luna’s wooden wand. “This. I made it light up. The same way I initiate any other piece of Ancient tech. And apparently her glasses are some kind of Ancient mind-reading device.”

Grodin looked pole-axed. “Well, this isn’t a development the Ministry foresaw when they had me work with the United States government.”

“Do we need to obliviate him?” Luna asked anxiously. “He’s obviously not really a muggle, is he?”

“He is,” Grodin said, “only - oh, dear.” He fished inside his robe and came up with a cell phone, dialed.

“Oh! Are Aurors carrying mobiles now?” Luna looked intrigued.

“Yes, this is Unspeakable Grodin,” he said. “I have a situation. Send Auror Tonks and - and John Sheppard, please. Thank you.” He hung up, smiled tightly. “Why don’t we find somewhere we can sit and wait?”

“There’s an all-night cafe nearby that sells good tea,” Luna suggested. She picked up her painting. After a moment, Evan did the same. He gave Luna back her wand - the light went out as soon as he let go of it - and the three of them headed for the cafe. When Grodin ordered an entire pot of tea, Evan realized he had a long night ahead of him, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have just gone out drinking with the guys instead.


End file.
